National Reports

Lack of housing is a severe problem that impairs many household’s quality of life. This explains the high expectations generated by the PROCREAR plan which provides subsidized loans financed directly with pension funds to some families chosen by a lottery. Besides being partial and inequitable, the plan accelerates the onset of an upcoming pension crisis like the ones that have happened thanks to similar initiatives in the past. A genuine solution to the housing problem requires eliminating inflation to regenerate a private market for long-term mortgage.

The electoral campaign is dominated by candidates from the City of Buenos Aires and Great Buenos Aires. This occurs in a context of unprecedented concentration of public funds at the central government, being most of them spent on the City and Great Buenos Aires. However, severe deprivation hits much harder inside the country. This is a costly contradiction that helps dodge important issues on the electoral debate, like the highly regressive economic subsidies.

Argentina is ready to accept 5 adverse verdicts at the ICSID and pay for rights trampled by policies executed after 2002. This abrupt change in attitude suggests that the policies carried out in the last decade were guided mainly by improvisation and lack of expertise than by ideological conviction. Anyhow, the important issue is that this precedent makes clear that an enormous effort will be necessary in order to resolve the remaining disputes.

Politicians are beginning to recognize last decade’s education decline. But simultaneously, they are minimizing its negative impacts. The clearest evidence is that the government intends to give a positive outlook to the large number of people who neither study nor work, arguing that most of them are young women dedicated to the caring of their children. This position, of an overwhelming conservatism, ignores that early motherhood with low education is a powerful factor in the intergenerational reproduction of poverty that adversely affects their children’s educational level.

According to INDEC, the incidence of unregistered employment remains above a third of the total workforce. This is a phenomenon, with very negative social impact that deserves special attention. There is no chance of inducing the formalization of small businesses if the administrative burden to register a worker is not simplified and the tax burden is not moderated. Therefore, the creation of a “special tax system for micro-enterprises” can provide solutions since almost all of informal employment is generated by micro-enterprises.